24 March 2018

Sermon Lent III Exodus 20:1-17, John 2:13-22 4 March 2018 Year B


An Episcopalian walks into a bar, hikes up on the barstool and says to the bartender, “Gimme a scotch on the rocks.” The bartender slides the drink across, and replies, “So…what have you been up to lately.” The person on the barstool replies, “Well, let’s see, I committed adultery last week.” Or maybe, “Oh I killed my neighbor last night because I covet his wife.” I wish I had a great punch line for what sounds like the beginning of a joke. But there isn’t a punch line because most of us wouldn’t boast about breaking that particular commandment.
         How recently have you heard this happen though, and not even in a bar? Or maybe even done it yourself, just like I have. Two people drag out their iPhones or Smart Phones or pocket calendars. The conversation goes something like this, “I just don’t know when we can get together. My schedule’s completely full. I don’t even have time to sleep.”
         There we go, boasting about breaking one of the commandments. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.”[1] Our reading from Exodus continues, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.”[2]
I am hardly suggesting we return to the rigid and uncompromising Sabbath of our Protestant forbears. What I am suggesting is that we are desperately in need of a Sabbath. A time each week to slow down, hush up, and turn off.
Many of us, even in retirement, are too busy to rest, to enjoy the gift of time God has given us. This gift of time, of slowing down, of being quiet, and turning off the busy world, is how God draws us back to God’s self. It is in quiet and rest that we so often find our selves again as the people God has created us to be.
Perhaps the reason, then, for Jesus overturning the temple tables, has to do with calling the temple and its people back to its reason for being, its reason for being created: as a house of worship and a place in which time stands still before the living God.
And, this Sunday, when we are halfway through Lent, is a good time to remind ourselves of who we are and the covenant we have made with God, in particular the covenant to rest so we have time and energy to find the blessings in all the commandments.
The Ten Commandments, especially the commandment to rest, to have a Sabbath, have become “the ten suggestions” in contemporary society. We need to remind ourselves the Ten Commandments are the word of God, given by God, as part of an agreement sought by God, between God and God’s people.
The Ten Commandments are not law in the sense we know secular law. The Ten Commandments are a law of redemption and mercy rather than a law of judgment. As God redeemed the nation of Israel from bondage to Egypt, the Ten Commandments are a gift rather than another kind of bondage. They are a gift of freedom in which the community can now act; free to form the obedience to which God has called them. Rather than subjection to Pharaoh or any other despotic leader, we can now claim our freedom to make a covenant, an agreement, with the Almighty God who rescues us from bondage.
         At the same time, the Ten Commandments are not something that we can pick and choose. Since it is the covenant between God and God’s people, the commandments choose us, rather than us choosing any or all of them. When we are invited into covenant with God, we do not get to choose what we promise. God does the inviting. God manages the terms of the contract.
         We are reminded each time we take a Sabbath rest, on whatever day that occurs for us, that in these Ten Commandments we have words that are living and true, words of redemption and grace. These words invite us into a “speaking” relationship with the Living God, in which the commandments laid out from the beginning continue to speak to us and bless us. Keeping the commandments becomes not a burden but a blessing.
The Ten Commandments are living words in a living world, with things to say to us about how we are dealt with by God, and how we respond. They are living words from a living God that speak to us about how we treat God, how we treat ourselves and how we treat our neighbors. The commandments speak to us not from the walls of the courtroom, nor from the judicial system, but from the mouth of the Living God, in response to our relationship with God. AMEN.


The Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2018


[1] The Book of Common Prayer (350)
[2] Exodus 20:8-11 (NRSV)

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